A ‘Man’ of few words that offers surprising rewards

For a sly, gently amusing fable about the dreams of the dispossessed, Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki’s “The Man Without a Past” has had a surprisingly potent presence on the international film scene.

With wins including both the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actress Award at Cannes last year, “The Man Without a Past” has been an honored guest at 37 festivals around the world. It was voted European movie of the year by the international critics group FIPRESCI and was one of the five Oscar finalists for best foreign language film. All this for a movie that at first glance is so minimalist it almost seems not to be there at all.

Kaurismaki, whose last film, 1999’s “Juha,” was accurately promoted as “the last silent movie of the 20th century,” has a simple and straightforward visual style, and his dialogue is so spare that it sounds as if the actors are reading silent film inter-titles.

Yet, in line with earlier Kaurismaki efforts like “Drifting Clouds,” “The Match Factory Girl” and the wonderfully named “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” “Man Without” offers up a subversive comic sensibility, one that somehow combines Buster Keaton’s deadpan stare with Frank Capra’s tireless optimism and filters them both through a black-ice Finnish point of view. Welcome to Aki World.

It’s an unhurried universe of down-and-outers, simple and (mostly) honest lost souls in a big city who count on one another for aid and comfort and don’t ask for much in return. “If you see me facedown in the gutter,” is one man’s simple request, “turn me on my back.” Trust me, it’s funnier in the original Finnish.

One reason it’s funnier is that Aki World insists on banning even a hint of facial expression; the more impassive the face, the better Kaurismaki likes it. Everyone stares blankly ahead, even children, as if the very act of making emotions visible would irredeemably corrupt the feelings expressed.

Aki World joins this blankness with one of the trendiest of current directorial preoccupations, shared with Lars von Trier, Todd Haynes and Baz Luhrmann: the expropriation and subversion of traditional melodramatic plots. Yet because his sensibility is so out there, Kaurismaki uses those forms to his own very different effect.

Taking a title that could have come straight from a 1940s B picture (think “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die,” “The Man Who Returned to Life,” “The Man With Two Lives”), this Aki World epic makes free with beatings, bank robberies and near-death experiences, specializing in depicting over-the-top events in an under-the-table style.

The film starts with one of those situations, as a man whose name we never learn (Markku Peltola) arrives at a Helsinki train station in the middle of the night. Before the sun can shine on him, he’s apparently beaten to death by feckless hooligans, only to rise from his hospital bed alive but with no memory of who he is or where he’s from.

The man falls in with a homeless family living in a large cargo container on the outskirts of town. After some negotiations with a security guard who styles himself the Whip of God, the man gets a container of his own, which is soon outfitted with a jukebox that plays (don’t they all) the blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Thus emboldened, the man makes a dinner visit to a Salvation Army encampment, where he exchanges significant glances with Irma, one of the army’s finest. She’s played by Kaurismaki veteran Kati Outinen, Cannes’ best actress winner for her uncanny ability to tease real emotion out of the surface impassivity the film insists on.

As the man makes his way in the world, coming to grips with love, the establishment and the Salvation Army’s questionable musical style, “The Man Without a Past” can’t resist taking cracks at how things work in Finland, specifically the fustiness of bureaucrats who are offended by the protagonist’s lack of nomenclature. The man himself, however, is fazed by nothing. “Life goes on,” he says, “not backwards,” and in Aki World those are words to live by.

*

‘The Man Without a Past’

MPAA rating: PG-13, for some violence

Times guidelines: An off-screen beating

Markku Peltola...Man

Kati Outinen...Irma

Juhani Niemela...Nieminen

A Sony Pictures Classic Release. Director Aki Kaurismaki. Producer Aki Kaurismaki. Screenplay Aki Kaurismaki. Cinematographer Timo Salminen. Editor Timo Linnasalo. Costumes Outi Herjupatana. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes. In limited release.